If you take another look at that page for ($?, $CHILD_ERROR), you will see that there are 2 other "if" clauses that follow the test for -1! This is a 16 bit value, not just the simple exit code. exit value of subprocess is high byte and low byte reports a signal. See page 661 of Programming Perl by Larry Wall. And oh, BTW decimal 256 is -1 in 8 bit lingo. Anyway this value is expected to be OS dependent.

Update: I tried this on my WinXP system and it doesn't even get as far as the print. I get text error message: 'no-such-program' is not recognized as an internal or external command, operable program or batch file. This is what the shell would give out.

In reply to Re: system and $? by Marshall
in thread system and $? by rovf

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